Salesforce Marketing Personalization: Features, Use Cases and Benefits

If you searched for “Salesforce Interaction Studio,” you landed on a name Salesforce stopped using years ago. The product is still around, but it has changed hands, changed names twice, and now sits next to a newer engine built for the AI era. Here is where things actually stand.

Short answer: Salesforce Interaction Studio was renamed Marketing Cloud Personalization in April 2022. In 2025, Salesforce introduced a successor called Salesforce Personalization, built natively on Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) and Agentforce. Both products are still supported today, but Salesforce Personalization is the platform it recommends for new deployments.

What Happened to Salesforce Interaction Studio?

Interaction Studio started life outside Salesforce entirely. Salesforce acquired a web personalization company called Evergage in 2020 and folded its technology into Marketing Cloud, first under the Evergage name, then as Interaction Studio. In April 2022, Salesforce renamed several Marketing Cloud products to make its portfolio easier to explain to buyers and analysts. Interaction Studio became Marketing Cloud Personalization; Journey Builder and related messaging tools became Marketing Cloud Engagement; Social Studio was retired outright.

There is a second, unrelated history worth flagging so nobody confuses the two. Long before the Evergage acquisition, Salesforce sold a different product also called Interaction Studio, built on technology from a UK company named Thunderhead. That older Thunderhead-based Interaction Studio was retired on March 1, 2023. If you inherited a Salesforce org with references to “Interaction Studio” from around 2018 or earlier, check which lineage you actually have before you assume it maps to today’s Marketing Cloud Personalization.

Marketing Cloud Personalization vs Salesforce Personalization: What’s the Difference?

This is the question most teams researching this topic actually want answered, and Salesforce is direct about it: the difference is architecture, not just branding.

Marketing Cloud Personalization runs as a standalone system. It works independently of the rest of the Salesforce platform, using its own rules engine, its own data model, and its own web and app SDKs. It is a mature product with years of implementation history behind it, which is exactly why so many teams still run it and why so much of the older documentation (including plenty of “what is Interaction Studio” blog posts) still gets search traffic.

Salesforce Personalization is built natively on Data 360 and powered by AI. Instead of managing a separate rules engine, it pulls from the same unified customer profile that feeds Agentforce, Sales, Service, and Marketing. That single difference cascades into a few practical ones:

• Decisions can draw on data from any connected source, not just what was piped into a standalone personalization tool.
• Agentforce agents can act on the same customer intent signals the personalization engine uses, and vice versa.
• Governance runs through the Einstein Trust Layer, so marketers get visibility into how an AI-driven decision was made rather than treating it as a black box.

Salesforce has said both products remain actively supported, and it is not forcing anyone off Marketing Cloud Personalization on a hard deadline. Existing customers can access Salesforce Personalization at no added cost through the Marketing Cloud Personalization+ edition, which runs both engines side by side so you can test new use cases without disrupting a working setup. For net-new implementations, Salesforce points customers toward Salesforce Personalization first.

What Are the Key Features of Salesforce Personalization?

In practice, the architecture shift shows up as a handful of concrete capabilities:

• Native mobile personalization. A unified SDK adapts content across both web and native iOS/Android apps, with mobile app personalization reaching general availability in July 2026.
• Agentforce-aware recommendations. Through an action called Get User Intent, Agentforce reads a customer’s conversation in real time and feeds structured intent signals straight into the personalization decisioning engine, so a chatbot exchange can shift what a customer sees on the same visit.
• Real-time offer management. Introduced in the Summer ’26 release, this centralizes and orchestrates promotions across channels with attribution reporting built in, instead of managing offer logic inside each campaign separately.
• Cross-cloud reach. Because everything sits on Data 360, the same profile that powers a personalized web banner can surface a next-best-action prompt for a sales rep in Agentforce Sales or a service agent in Agentforce Service.

Marketing Cloud Personalization Features: What It Still Does for Existing Customers

Most Salesforce customers are not running the newer engine yet, so it’s worth being clear about what today’s Marketing Cloud Personalization actually does, rather than describing it in the past tense.

It builds a single profile for each visitor, known or anonymous, by combining behavioral signals with declared data. A few capabilities carry the load:

• Real-time behavioral tracking. The Web SDK captures page views, time on page, clicks, and purchase activity as they happen, and feeds them straight into the visitor’s profile.
• Anonymous visitor tailoring. Banners, layouts, and offers can adjust for a shopper who hasn’t logged in or shared an email address, based purely on session behavior.
• Einstein product recommendations. Machine learning ranks products or content against a visitor’s current interest, not just their past purchase history.
• Open-time email personalization. Images, products, and offers inside an email render based on the customer’s interest at the moment they open it, not the moment the campaign was scheduled.
• Journey Builder triggers. Personalization events can kick off Journey Builder to send an SMS or push notification the moment a defined behavior happens on-site.
• Data Cloud segments. Where Data Cloud is connected, Marketing Cloud Personalization pulls in unified profiles, calculated insights, and segments to sharpen decisions beyond what its own behavioral data alone would support.
• Sales and Service Cloud visibility. A service rep or sales agent can see what a customer was browsing in real time during a call or chat, without switching tools.

This is a mature, well-documented feature set, and it’s why so many teams have no urgency to move off it. The distinction with Salesforce Personalization isn’t that these capabilities disappear, it’s that they get inherited by a system built natively on top of Data 360 instead of connecting to it as a separate product.

How Does Salesforce Personalization Work in a Multi-Cloud Setup?

Salesforce Personalization is rarely a standalone project, because its entire value case depends on data flowing in from wherever your customer records already live. If you’re running Marketing Cloud alongside Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, or an industry cloud, a few things affect how the setup actually goes:

• Data 360 has to come first, not alongside. Personalization reads from the unified profile; if Sales, Service, and Commerce data aren’t already resolving to the same customer record, personalization decisions will be built on partial information no matter how good the AI layer is.
• Identity resolution is the hard part, not the personalization rules. Most implementation time in a multi-cloud setup goes into matching known and anonymous identities across systems consistently, not into configuring recommendation logic.
• Integration load depends on how many systems feed Data 360. Orgs pulling from e-commerce platforms, POS systems, or external data warehouses alongside Salesforce clouds typically need MuleSoft or a similar integration layer to keep that data current.
• Agentforce adds a dependency, not just a feature. If sales or service teams are meant to see personalization-driven next-best-action prompts, that connection needs to be planned as part of the same rollout, not bolted on afterward.

For orgs already juggling multiple clouds, sequencing this correctly matters more than picking the “right” personalization product on day one. Our Salesforce multi-cloud implementation strategy walks through how to plan that sequencing across clouds.

Salesforce Personalization Use Case: How a Retail Brand Increased Conversions

Rather than list generic capabilities, it’s more useful to see how they come together for one company. Fisher & Paykel, the luxury home-appliance brand, is a documented Salesforce customer that shows what the platform’s features actually produce when they’re implemented together, not just what they’re supposed to do on paper.

The starting problem. Fisher & Paykel’s customer data was split across separate systems for commerce, marketing, and service. A shopper’s browsing history on the website had no connection to what a sales rep or support agent saw later, so every channel treated the same customer as a stranger.

What they implemented. Fisher & Paykel brought CRM, commerce, and engagement data together in Data 360, then used Salesforce Personalization on top of that unified profile to recommend products during a customer’s cart journey, rather than relying on static merchandising or generic email segments. Marketing Cloud runs alongside it to trigger automated journeys when a customer visits specific product pages, and Service Cloud draws on the same profile so support reps aren’t working from a blank slate.

What it produced. Out of roughly 11,000 personalized product recommendations shown during cart journeys, Fisher & Paykel saw a 33% increase in order conversion and a 40% jump in product views across categories. The same unified data also let them offer a subscription option at the point of purchase; roughly 30% of customers chose it over a one-time purchase, which gives the business more predictable recurring revenue instead of one-off transactions.

Why the sequence matters. None of those numbers came from the personalization engine in isolation. They came from unifying the data first, so the recommendation shown at checkout reflected the same customer record marketing and service were already looking at. That’s the pattern worth copying: a retailer or appliance brand chasing a similar conversion lift needs the Data 360 foundation in place before the personalization layer has anything meaningful to work with.

Should You Migrate from Marketing Cloud Personalization to Salesforce Personalization?

There is no single right answer here, but a few questions tend to separate the teams that should move now from the teams that should wait.

• Is Data 360 already implemented, or on your roadmap? Salesforce Personalization is built on it. Migrating before your data foundation is unified usually means recreating the same silo problem under a new name.
• How much custom logic lives inside your current Marketing Cloud Personalization rules? Teams with years of finely tuned, standalone rules face a real rebuild cost, not just a relabeling exercise.
• Do you already use Agentforce, or plan to? If agents are part of your customer-facing roadmap, running personalization on the same data layer removes a lot of duplicate integration work later.
• What’s your appetite for running both in parallel? The Marketing Cloud Personalization+ edition exists precisely so you can pilot Salesforce Personalization on a subset of use cases while your existing setup keeps running.

For most mid-to-large Marketing Cloud customers, the practical path is a phased one: unify data in Data 360, pilot Salesforce Personalization on one or two high-value journeys such as cart recovery or post-purchase upsell, and expand from there once the results and the internal skill set catch up.

Salesforce Personalization FAQs

Is Salesforce Interaction Studio Still a Product?

No. The name was retired in April 2022 when Salesforce rebranded it as Marketing Cloud Personalization. A separate, older product with the same name (built on Thunderhead technology) was also retired, in March 2023.

Are Marketing Cloud Personalization and Evergage the Same Thing?

Yes. Evergage was the company Salesforce acquired in 2020. Its technology became Interaction Studio and later Marketing Cloud Personalization.

Do I Have to Migrate to Salesforce Personalization?

No. Salesforce continues to support Marketing Cloud Personalization, and there is no announced retirement date. Salesforce Personalization is the recommended path for new implementations, and existing customers can access it at no extra cost through the Marketing Cloud Personalization+ edition.

What Does Salesforce Personalization Need to Work?

It runs on Data 360, so a unified customer data model is a prerequisite for getting real value out of it, not an optional add-on.

Does Salesforce Personalization Work with Agentforce?

Yes. Agentforce can read live conversation intent through the Get User Intent action and feed it directly into the personalization engine, and personalization data can surface inside Agentforce Sales and Service consoles as next-best-action guidance.

How to Choose the Right Personalization Path for Your Salesforce Org

Most of the “Salesforce Interaction Studio” content still ranking on the web today is three to five years old, and it shows: readers land on articles describing a product name Salesforce has not used since 2022. That gap matters beyond SEO. Teams making budget and roadmap decisions on outdated product information end up scoping the wrong project, whether that means over-investing in a standalone personalization build when Data 360 was already on the roadmap, or under-estimating what it takes to connect personalization to an Agentforce rollout.

Our take, working with clients across Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud engagements, is that the naming history is less important than the sequencing decision behind it: personalization only performs as well as the data feeding it.

Organizations that jump straight to Salesforce Personalization without a real customer data foundation tend to see the same generic-feeling experiences they had before, just running on newer infrastructure. The ones that get results treat Data 360 as the actual project and personalization as one of several capabilities it unlocks, alongside Agentforce and better-informed sales and service teams.

If you’re trying to work out whether your org is still running the old rules-based engine, whether you’re a candidate for the Personalization+ edition, or where personalization fits inside a wider Salesforce roadmap, our Salesforce consulting team can walk through your current setup and map a realistic next step.

You can also read our take on where the broader Salesforce roadmap is heading in 2026 for the wider context.

For orgs already live on Marketing Cloud Personalization who just need day-to-day support while they plan a move, our managed services team can keep the current setup healthy in the meantime, and a Salesforce health check is a low-lift way to find out what state your existing configuration is actually in before you commit to a migration plan.

Have questions about your specific setup? Talk to our team.